Richard Avedon: Immortal: Portraits of Aging

For nearly half a century, celebrated American photographer Richard Avedon confronted one of portraiture’s enduring taboos: aging. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon broke with the conventions of idealized celebrity portraiture, revealing the marks of time on his subjects’ faces with unsparing clarity. Bringing together nearly 100 portraits made between the early 1950s and 2004, the exhibition features artists, writers, musicians and cultural icons including Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Duke Ellington, Ronald Reagan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Patti Smith, Truman Capote and the Dalai Lama. Immortal also includes a restaging of Avedon’s seminal 1974 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Jacob Israel Avedon, which chronicled his father’s final years in nine extraordinary portraits. Taken as a whole, the photographs reveal a lesser-known dimension of Avedon’s practice and offer an unprecedented exploration of aging through his distinctive vision.